Marketing is a fast-moving business, and digital marketing is even faster because it is changing all the time. “Just keeping up” can be hard especially when your own industry is changing rapidly, independently of what is happening online.
Medical device marketing shares some key strategies with healthcare marketing in general, however, it also presents a number of challenges that are best tackled with certain tools. TBA Digital’s Blackboard is a great starting point for any medical device marketing professional looking for resources, but let’s take a deeper dive into some of the digital tools that are best suited for medical device marketing.
CloudScape spins up a range of different VM instances on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to run popular benchmarks to test system performance and presents easy to understand performance statistics.
Where is your Customer Journey without a map? Lost, that's where! In this video, we’ll take you through part one of the steps to creating your very own customer journey map.
Transcript
All right. It's time to start making
your own customer journey map.
Where do you even begin?
There are two main ways
to kick off the process.
You can start with the research,
or you can start with your best
guess or hypothesis as to what your
customer journey should look like.
In the research-first approach,
you gather all of the existing
customer information you have.
Then you conduct surveys or use other
primary research methods to fill the gaps.
This approach offers the
advantage of objectivity.
You begin with raw information and
try to leave your biases behind.
The whole process can take as little as
a few weeks, or as long as three months.
In the hypothesis approach,
you can conduct a workshop with internal
stakeholders that might last a day or
two. In it,
you get everybody to contribute their
best ideas of what your customers'
experiences are in their journeys
with your brand. Beginning to end,
and get it all down on paper.
Now I'm sure a lot of your eyes lit up
upon hearing the second alternative.
One or two days, as opposed to a minimum
of weeks of research? Door number two,
please. Not so fast.
The next step with the hypothesis-first
approach is. . . You guessed it!
Doing research to verify or refute
your assumptions from the initial
brainstorming session.
I know we all want to bypass research
because it's so expensive and time
consuming, but it's unavoidable
if you want to do this properly,
whether you're sifting through data
that's already been collected or starting
from scratch.
That's not to say that the hypothesis
approach doesn't have its advantages.
For one thing,
it immediately gives you a starting point
and a focus for your primary research.
The disadvantage of the hypothesis-first
approach is that some people on your
team may be less willing to discard
their initial brainstorming map when the
real data comes in and conflicts
with their first notion.
So how do you actually go
about doing this research?
You start with any data your
company may have already gathered.
This is probably the
least expensive option,
and should also give you some
leads on where else to look. First,
go to your departments that
interact directly with customers,
such as sales or customer service.
Call center logs will
probably give you an earful.
If your company requires your customers
to register their product so they can
avail themselves of warranty service,
there may be a wealth of
information there. Particularly,
if the form they filled out includes
questions like how did you first learn
about the Kelvinator Model 273?
If your company's website has a comment
sections for customer experiences,
this could be another great
source of information.
If third-party vendors like Amazon
or other retailers sell your product,
their comment sections may also have
ratings and reviews full of insights.
And of course, check out
your social media pages.
If you're working for an
enterprise-level business,
there's a chance that some employee
has trod this path before you.
Your company may have already
conducted surveys, focus groups,
or gathered accounts from other
sources. And if your company is B2B,
you'll want to talk to sales reps.
These are the people who will
know your customers best.
So let's say you're digging has uncovered
at least some real information about
customer journeys.
A logical next step is to set up a
spreadsheet with stages of the customer
journey or timeline across the top.
Paul Boag of Boag Research recommends
five phases or stages for the
customer journey--and
certainly no more than seven.
If you started with the hypothesis method,
your team has already come up with a
format for your customer journey map.
You can fill in the category labels going
down the left-hand side of our matrix,
but you may also choose to leave it blank.
Let's just see what kind of data
we've collected first.
Next, you fill in the squares in the columns
below in the different phases with
whatever you've collected.
Maybe you've got direct quotes,:"Love
the chart comparing features of different
plans," or "No one should have to
spend this long on hold!" Maybe you
unearth some statistics in a prior study.
33% of our customers first heard
about us on the prices, right?
Or maybe you've got a graph of customer
happiness spanning four or five
categories, but couldn't find the
source data. Whatever you have,
just put it all in there under whichever
phase you think is most appropriate.
So it's a little early to be
calling it a customer journey map,
but let's say your beta customer
matrix looks something like this.
Hmmm. So I see we've got
plenty of information towards
the end of our journey,
mostly around the actual purchase point,
but very little under the
awareness or decision phases.
And while we have some data
under the consideration phase,
not much insight into the customer's
emotional state while mulling over her
choices.
Already,
you've got some idea of where the biggest
gaps in your customer journey are.
And that's where we're going to
start looking for information. Okay,
you've done your leg work. You've found
and organized your existing research.
Next, the primary research
begins along with some decisions.
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